As was speculated earlier this week, the IEEE Task Group (TG3a) charged with the task of determining and ratifying a single ultra wideband standard has voted to disband. Obviously, the fight between the WiMedia Alliance and the UWB Forum and their competing specs has been deemed unresolvable, so the IEEE has decided to cut bait.
As a result, the companies that comprise the members of both groups will be pretty much left to their own devices to build products that fit their faction's UWB spec. What that will mean is that we'll be seeing a bunch of products hit the marketplace that are incompatible and consumers will have to be very careful to make sure what they're buying is right for their needs. What it also means is that the IEEE pretty much threw in the towel without a fight and were pushed around by both groups without showing any mettle to get things resolved.
1. Michael, I have to disagree with two statements. First, you wrote, "a bunch of products hit the marketplace that are incompatible and consumers will have to be very careful to make sure what they're buying is right for their needs."
I don't think this will happen. The vast majority of companies involved in consumer and PC electronics are in the WiMedia Alliance. Freescale has signed up a few early adopters, but WiMedia includes multiple chip vendors, CE makers, PC vendors, etc. These companies won't buy or make Freescale-compatible gear.
Second, you critique the IEEE for not mediating this dispute, but that's not how the task groups work. The IEEE task group membership is open to anyone who pays the meeting fees and attends enough meetings to become a voting member. Votes are by voting members, not by companies. The groups are run by consensus with various parliamentary process.
Freescale was able to prevent 802.15.3a from completing its work by making sure that they had plenty of voting members, out of proportion to their industry representation. When you say the IEEE was pushed around by both groups -- the membership of the task group was almost entirely members of both groups. Freescale was able to game the voting process using methods that aren't considered illegitimate, just expensive -- they flew a lot of people around the world and paid a lot of registration fees.
Posted at 4:44PM on Jan 19th 2006 by Glenn Fleishman